What is the hiring process like at MSD?

The welfare benefits are relatively complete

The system process is complicated

Excellent work-life balance for interns. As this is an international company, expect frequent meetings at irregular times to accommodate headquarters. Meritocracy is highly valued, take the lab onboarding process seriously, work hard and you will be rewarded with more learning opportunities! Staff welfare is generous.

Depending on supervisor, you might have a steeper learning curve than other interns, but things are still learnable if you take your own initiative.

The overall corporate (global) portion of the company has a lot of money which masks a lot of issues at site level. MSD has a good reputation in ireland in most other sites than here.

The Dunboyne site has been completely miss-managed by the SLT & HR from the Takeda days - through covid - and up until relatively recently. There has been a small improvement after former SLT were "quiet-Fired" and rotated to irrelevant positions. American legacy directors have arrived to replace the older irish ones and they seem to have the right gusto. After years of stagnant outlook -people who deserve to be fired have been. Regarding the manufacturing dept. , Due to bad resource management and terrible hiring regimes (I.E the 2023 drive to replace the young energetic staff with incompetent, technologically & scientifically illiterate older people for less money) change in manufacturing has been glacial and thwarted. Adversarial mindset of supporting depts means no real change has occurred in years which drives high MFG staff turnover. Would not recommend the MFG dept, other dept possibly. 5 year outlook will not be good if a keytruda replacement is not found

The people on my team were great, dedicated testers trying to do their best and really cared about doing the job well.

The processes for the SDLC were bloated and over complicated. I spent 70% of my time filling out documents and ticking boxes and 30% actually testing. Management cares more about filling out forms in triplicate and ticking boxes than the job of testing. It was a really toxic environment and I saw on more than one occasion someone was screamed at when a task was not done according to the standards.(Turned out in one case the employee did not know how to do it but was too embarrassed to ask for help)